1,720,991 research outputs found
Muscular effort coding in action representation in ballet dancers and controls: electrophysiological evidence
No full textThe present electrophysiological (EEG) study investigated the neural correlates of perceiving effortful vs. effortless movements belonging to a specific repertoire (ballet). Previous evidence has shown an increased heart and respiratory rate during the observation and imagination of human actions that require a great muscular effort. In addition, TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) and EEG studies have evidenced a greater muscle-specific cortical excitability and an increase in late event-related potentials during the observation of effortful actions. In this investigation, fifteen professional female ballet dancers and 15 controls with no experience whatsoever with dance, gymnastics, or martial arts were recruited. They were shown 326 short videos displaying a male dancer performing standard ballet steps that could be either effortful or relatively effortless. Participants were instructed to observe each clip and imagine themselves physically executing the same movement. Importantly, they were blinded to the stimuli properties. The observation of effortful compared with effortless movements resulted in a larger P300 over frontal sites in dancers only, likely because of their visuomotor expertise with the specific steps. Moreover, an enhanced Late Positivity was identified over posterior sites in response to effortful stimuli in both groups, possibly reflecting the processing of larger quantities of visual kinematic information. The source reconstruction swLORETA performed on the Late Positivity component showed greater engagement of frontoparietal regions in dancers, while task-related frontal and occipitotemporal visual regions were more active in controls. It, therefore, appears that, in dancers, effort information was encoded in a more refined manner during action observation and in the absence of explicit instruction. Acquired motor knowledge seems to result in visuomotor resonance processes, which, in turn, underlies enhanced action representation of the observed movements
Endogenous attention to object features modulates the ERP C1 component
No full textConverging neuroimaging and electrophysiological evidence supports the notion that selective attention can modulate neural activity not only in V1 (BA17) - as early as 40-60 ms post-stimulus - but also at subcortical level (thalamic lateral geniculate nucleus, LGN). V1 modulation has been documented both in space-based and (especially) object-based selection conditions, most of all in endogenous orienting paradigms. It seems then that an attentional modulation of ERP C1 response - reflecting V1 modulation - would not be especially favoured by exogenous cuing as far as object-based attention is concerne
Semantic brain areas are involved in gesture comprehension: an electrical neuroimaging study
No full textWhile the mechanism of sign language comprehension in deaf people has been widely investigated, little is known about the neural underpinnings of spontaneous gesture comprehension in healthy speakers. Bioelectrical responses to 800 pictures of actors showing common Italian gestures (e.g., emblems, deictic or iconic gestures) were recorded in 14 persons. Stimuli were selected from a wider corpus of 1122 gestures. Half of the pictures were preceded by an incongruent description. ERPs were recorded from 128 sites while participants decided whether the stimulus was congruent. Congruent pictures elicited a posterior P300 followed by late positivity, while incongruent gestures elicited an anterior N400 response. N400 generators were investigated with swLORETA reconstruction. Processing of congruent gestures activated face- and body-related visual areas (e.g., BA19, BA37, BA22), the left angular gyrus, mirror fronto/parietal areas. The incongruent-congruent contrast particularly stimulated linguistic and semantic brain areas, such as the left medial and the superior temporal lobe
Machine learning classification of motivational states: Insights from EEG analysis of perception and imagery
Full text linkThe investigation of neural correlates of mental imagery and perception has been a pivotal area of research in cognitive neuroscience, offering significant insights into how the brain represents both imagined and perceived experiences. While previous studies have successfully identified electrophysiological markers associated with motor and perceptual imagery, the neural signatures of motivational imagery — encompassing desires, needs, and cravings — remain underexplored. This study employs different machine learning classifiers applied to EEG data to classify and compare neural representations of twelve distinct motivational states under perception and imagery conditions. We conducted experiments using 14-channel and 18-channel EEG configurations to capture and analyze the neural responses of participants exposed to various stimuli. Our primary aims were to evaluate classification performance, measured by accuracy, and assess the impact of electrode density on performance. The results indicate that perception conditions generally yield higher accuracy in distinguishing motivational states than imagery conditions. Specifically, primary needs and somatosensory states exhibited strong and clear neural patterns in perception, with a peak accuracy of 88% in the 18-channel setup, while the accuracy for imagined states was more variable. Comparisons between 14-channel and 18-channel configurations revealed that higher electrode density slightly improved performance but was not significantly superior
Affective and cooperative social interactions modulate effective connectivity within and between the mirror and mentalizing systems
No full textDecoding the meaning of othersâ actions, a crucial step for social cognition, involves different neural mechanisms. While the âmirrorâ and âmentalizingâ systems have been associated with, respectively, the processing of biological actions versus more abstract information, their respective contribution to intention understanding is debated. Processing social interactions seems to recruit both neural systems, with a different weight depending on cues emphasizing either shared action goals or shared mental states. We have previously shown that observing cooperative and affective social interactions elicits stronger activity in key nodes of, respectively, the mirror (left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), superior parietal cortex (SPL), and ventral/dorsal premotor cortex (vPMC/dPMC)) and mentalizing (ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)) systems. To unveil their causal organization, we investigated the effective connectivity underlying the observation of human social interactions expressing increasing cooperativity (involving left pSTS, SPL, and vPMC) versus affectivity (vmPFC) via dynamic causal modeling in 36 healthy human subjects. We found strong evidence for a model including the pSTS and vPMC as input nodes for the observed interactions. The extrinsic connectivity of this model undergoes oppositely valenced modulations, with cooperativity promoting positive modulations of connectivity between pSTS and both SPL (forward) and vPMC (mainly backward), and affectivity promoting reciprocal positive modulations of connectivity between pSTS and vmPFC (mainly backward). Alongside fMRI data, such divergent effective connectivity suggests that different dimensions underlying the processing of social interactions recruit distinct, although strongly interconnected, neural pathways associated with, respectively, the bottomâup visuomotor processing of motor intentions, and the topâdown attribution of affective/mental states
Data for: "Music Literacy shapes the Specialization of a Right-hemispheric Word Reading area, beyond VWFA"
No full textThis study investigates the neural mechanisms underlying word reading in professional musicians compared to musically naïve individuals (control group), focusing on the N170 component of ERPs dedicated to orthographic processing. The application of standardized weighted low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (swLORETA) to individual data contributes to the innovative nature of this project. The results showed that musicians showed a bilateral activation of the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA, BA37) in contrast to controls who showed a clearly left lateralized activation of the middle occipital gyrus (MOG, BA19). Musicians also showed enhanced reading skills compared to controls. It is thought that musicians develop this extra reading region to read the spatial and holistic aspects of musical notation.
ERPs were recorded in 80 participants (men and women, musicians and non-musicians).
The study involved the visual presentation of 300 Italian words of different length and complexity, presented randomly on a computer screen, as described in detail in the study by Proverbio et al. (2013). The words, written in upper case, ranged from 4 to 10 letters. A recognition task was performed in which participants had to press a key when they saw a specific target letter within a word, depending on the experimental condition, while ignoring non-target letters. Words lasted 1,600 ms, and the interstimulus interval (ISI) was randomly varied between 1,000 and 1,200 ms. ERPs were averaged from -100 to 1200 ms. The N170 component was quantified between 150-190 ms. swLORETA was applied to N170 responses during word reading in both groups. The full list of dipoles and neuroimaging data is presented here. The data are a compendium to the paper "Music Literacy shapes the Specialization of a Right-hemispheric Word Reading area" and include raw data collected from 2013 to 2023 at the Cognitive Lab ERP of UNIMIB for the "Neuroscience of Music" project.
Related papers:
Pantaleo MM, Arcuri G, Manfredi M, Proverbio AM. Music literacy improves reading skills via bilateral orthographic development. Sci Rep. 2024 Feb 12;14(1):3506.
Proverbio AM, Manfredi M, Zani A, Adorni R. Musical expertise affects neural bases of letter recognition. Neuropsychologia. 2013 Feb;51(3):538-49
Data for "Infra-Delta Oscillatory Signatures and Gesture Density in Expert Piano Performance"
No full textAn elite professional pianist executed a 30-minute, uninterrupted performance of seven pieces on a Yamaha P-225B digital piano in an anechoic chamber, employing the default soundbank. The repertoire featured Contrapunctus I (BWV 1080) by Bach and an excerpt from Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, Op. 23, performed from memory based on urtext editions. Key-press onset events were annotated per hand to quantify note and gesture counts, excluding legato transitions without discrete attacks. Both performances exhibited a convergent low-frequency periodicity in beat-level timing variability (tactus imprecision), oscillating at approximately 0.36 Hz. This slow temporal modulation aligns with the delta-band range of neural oscillations and may reflect a shared endogenous timing scaffold, plausibly motor in origin, underlying expressive control in skilled performance
An auditory-mediated communication paradigm for evaluating individual needs and motivational states in locked-in patients.
No full textThe stimulus set was used in the ERP paper "Decoding Motivational States and Craving through Electrical Markers for Neural 'Mind Reading’ by Proverbio AM & Zanetti A (2025). The aim of this study was to identify electrical neuromarkers of 12 different motivational and physiological states (such as visceral craves, affective and somatosensory states, and secondary needs) in LIS, coma, or minimally conscious state patients.
Auditory stimuli were designed by combining a human expressive voice with a background sound to evoke a context related to the targeted needs. The stimuli included: primary or visceral needs (hunger, thirst, and sleep), homeostatic or somatosensory sensations (cold, heat, and pain), emotional or affective states (sadness, joy, and fear), and secondary needs (desire for music, movement, and play). 17 audio clips were recorded for each micro-category, each replicated twice: once with a male voice and once with a female voice, totaling 408 stimuli.
Audacity software was used to combining the vocal track with a background context coherent with the verbal content. Human voices were recorded using Microphone 202 K38 by Hompower (SNR = 80 dB). The semantic content, the prosodic intonation and the emotional tone of all voices were coherent and appropriately matched. Some of the background sounds were recorded using the same microphone, while others were sourced from the publicly accessible BBC Sound Effects library for scientific purposes (https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search).
Research was funded by ATE – Fondo di Ateneo No. 31159-2019-ATE-0064, University of Milano-Bicocca.
The research project, entitled “Auditory imagery in BCI mental reconstruction” was preapproved by the Research Assessment Committee of the Department of Psychology (CRIP) for minimal risk projects, under the aegis of the Ethical committee of University of Milano-Bicocca, on February 9th, 2024, protocol n: RM-2024-775)
A Nonverbal Signs Dataset for the Italian Population
No full textA Nonverbal Signs Dataset for the Italian Population
1,522 Colorful Stimuli of Spontaneous Social Communication, for experimental settings, including EEG/ERP experiments.
The provided stimuli are made available for use with the understanding that proper acknowledgment and citation of the source are required in any resulting work or publication. Proper attribution not only ensures academic integrity but also duly recognizes the effort involved in their development. Should further details regarding citation be needed, the relevant information can be provided upon request.
SOURCE and VALIDATION studies:
- Proverbio AM, Gabaro V, Orlandi A, Zani A. Semantic brain areas are involved in gesture comprehension: An electrical neuroimaging study. Brain Lang. 2015 Aug;147:30-40. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2015.05.002.
- Proverbio AM, Ornaghi L, Gabaro V. How face blurring affects body language processing of static gestures in women and men. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2018 Jun 1;13(6):590-603. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsy033
Data for: ERP markers of visual and auditory imagery: a ‘mind reading’ approach for BCI systems
No full textGrand-average ERP waveforms recorded during mental imagery and perception of visual and auditory stimuli in a large group of healthy right-handed participants. Visual and auditory stimuli representing biologically relevant categories (e.g., faces, animals, voices…) were presented to 30 participants during a perceptual and an imagery condition, to collect the corresponding neural electrical signals. Unprecedented electro-physiological markers of imagery (in absence of sensory stimulation) were identified showing a specific response at given scalp sites and latency during imagination of infants (centroparietal positivity, CPP and late CPP), human faces (anterior negativity, AN), animals (anterior positivity, AP), music (P300), speech (N400), vocalizations (P2-like) and sensory (visual vs. auditory) modality (PN300).
These ERP markers might be precious tools for BCI systems (pattern recognition, classification or A.I. algorithms) applied to patients affected by consciousness disorders (e.g., in a vegetative or comatose state) or locked-in-patients (e.g. spinal or SLA patients)
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